I
t’s such a rare thing, to find a news story about someone who identifies as genderqueer. Usually, the news tories are full of what I like to call “traditional trassexual people” – meaning, those who follow a traditional path, going from one gender to “the other”.
“So for me, genderqueer is just a … different label for how I express my gender in a way that to me is not man or woman.”
Evnen dropped the pronouns “she” and “her” for personal identification, preferring the use of “they” or “them.” Emily became Ev.
Identifying as genderqueer didn’t change Evnen, but it was liberating.
“I just finally had a word that I could use to describe myself,” they — Evnen — said. “It gave me a little bit more space to kind of explore and play, and wear ties more frequently.”
They are surrounded by a community of family and friends, both in Cambridge, Mass., where they now live, and in their hometown of Lincoln, to which they return frequently, most recently to have wisdom teeth removed.
Evnen’s father, Richard, gets it.
“I also believe that a person’s gender and their identity that springs forth from that gender contains elements of both genders. It’s sort of a slider,” he said. “Some people are maybe more to one end of that spectrum than the other. Some people are more in the middle.”
Thanks for the Lincoln Journal Star & the journalist JoAnne Young for getting it right. Even those Young used “she” pronouns, she did so only because that pronoun was relevant to the story, and switched to Ev’s preferred gender neutral pronouns as soon as that was out of the way.